Barbell Shrugged - The 5 Best Supplements For Performance - 253

Episode Date: March 29, 2017

It seems like every other health article and Instagram post is trying to promote the next best supplement these days. It is very hard to get unbiased information on supplements. It is straight up confusing to feed through the hype and distinguish between clever marketing and what actual works.  Most sources? They have an agenda. Supplement companies misrepresenting science. Media sensationalizing headlines. Companies and individuals pushing unneeded supplements and other products onto you. We aren’t saying that all supplement companies are out to cheat you. There are some great brands and products out there for sure. However, it is not so simple to feed through all the noise. That’s why we brought Kamal Patel on the show. Kamal runs Examine.com. Examine is an unbiased database of supplement and nutrition information. What is unique about Examine, is that they have no monetary agenda around selling you products. They are pulling together all the science, reading the research, and putting it online.  In this episode, we catch up with Dr Andy Galpin and Kamal at Andy’s lab and talk about what supplements you should be taking and which ones are overhyped. If you want to settle the confusion around supplements and start directing your energy towards what works, this episode is for you. Also, if this show sparks your interest to tap into to more info, you can get access to premium Examine resources like their supplement stack guides and research digests to optimize your supplementation and stay on top of the latest supplement research. Save as much as 20% when you visit barbellshrugged.com/examine enjoy the show.  Mike

If you've ever sat there and gone like, man, I really wish there was one place I could go that just took all the science so I don't have to bother to read it, put it in one place and then told me if it worked and how much to take and when to take it, that's exactly what your website does. Welcome to Barbell Shrug. I'm Mike Bledsoe here with Doug Larson.

We have Dr. Andy Galpin. And our guest today is Kamal Patel from examine.com. We're going to be talking about supplements, research. And one of the big reasons we're talking about this is because people tend to get confused about this very easily a lot of magazines online blogs things like that are posting articles about supplements and they may or may not be very accurate and we found the examine.com to be a really great put great place to find that stuff can you tell us more about examine sure so examine.com is just information. What I mean by that is we don't, you know, write articles about why low carb is good or bad or whatever.

We report on studies as they come out. So if there's a study that comes out that says low carb diets can be used for, you know, controlling seizures in kids with this specific disorder, we report on that. If there's a study that comes out that says a new form of creatine is better for power athletes, then we report on that, and that's it. We just report over and over and over and over again, and that's our entire job. So you take the research studies and then you distill them down to something that the everyday kind of layperson who doesn't have a research background and is not a nutrition scientist so to speak um can figure out and take that information actually use to to improve their health or their performance or what have you yep so we've got both um so if you look up creatine uh possibly even on google well if you look up fish oil on google hopefully we might

be on the first page and when you click on the link, there's a summary up there that says what fish oil is good for, what it's not good for, just in about a paragraph or two. But then after that is about 700-some citations worth of evidence. So we go through every system in your body, you know, from neurological to gut health, musculoskeletal health. And we talk about all the studies that have been done on that and if the studies are any good or not. So that's really awesome because a lot of people, they'll see, kind of like Mike said earlier, they'll see a blog article or something that was in a newspaper

or a magazine or what have you, and it'll have some ridiculous headline like fish oil doesn't work. And then it'll say it'll have one study that showed that fish oil didn't do whatever they were trying to do, and then they generalize across many different categories as fish oil doesn't work and then it'll say it'll have one study that showed that fish oil didn't do whatever they were trying to do and then they generalize across many different categories as fish oil doesn't work but in your case you're saying that if there's like 700 studies on something well it matters what the rest of the 699 other studies show and so you guys break it down and show or rather explain what collectively all the different studies on a particular topic are saying about what the effects are yeah so you know if you're just a average joe or if you're a non-average joe

if you're a competitive athlete then you're probably thinking you know what supplements should i take for whatever goal to build more muscle to lose more fat to you know perform better perform better in other ways, whatever. He's talking about the bedroom. That's what I was going to do. I knew it. I knew it. So we got a lot of emails on that, a lot.

Anyway. Do you guys have a page on that, like sexual performance? We do. Real quick, though. I got a buddy. He was trying to get me to pick this stuff up in Chinatown. Oh, yeah. And you put it on the tip.

Just the tip? Just the tip. Does it work? I'd have to say it's probably going to work. Just the tip supplements tend to be the best ones. Are all those emails from a guy named Schmeich Schmedso? Schmeich Schmedso. Yeah, so testosterone boosters or not, unless you didn't already know that,

worst category of supplements out there, not because there aren't supplements that boost testosterone, just because there's very few, if any, that reliably and sustainably boost testosterone. So there's things. It's the perfect category to sell snake oil. I think actually snake oil originally was a supplement to boost testosterone. I don't know if I can verify that. Maybe I'll look category to sell snake oil. I think actually snake oil originally was a supplement to boost testosterone. I don't know if I can verify that. Maybe I'll look it up on my own. I don't care if that's true. That sounds awesome. Yeah. I'm totally drinking snake oil.

Yeah. So snake oil is a thing. You know, we're a hundred years too late to see it in action, but people would, would carry around, you know, vials of snake oil and sell it. Cause it's, it's a fatty acid. It's like fish oil, but it's snake oil. It was like a cure-all back in the day. Yeah, it was a cure-all. So the original snake oil was snake oil. And now the new snake oil is all the testosterone boosters. So there's ones that haven't been studied in humans at all.

Horny goat weed, for example, my favorite to read about. It's a great name and then there's one there's ones with a lot of research but in toads in toast yeah there's very sexually enhanced toads uh yeah well there's a i remember reading about dia spartic acid yeah and i took that for a while but then i started getting the sense that maybe i shouldn't be taking i feel like that stuff kind of fell off the map it was really popular for a while that is reptiles that's the yeah it's the classic story of uh testosterone boosting supplements is you know one or two studies come out in this case it was two i think um and da is somewhere in between you know it's not useless it's not

possibly useful um but it is one of the few that can actually impact testosterone like most if not all the rest can impact libido independent of testosterone which is a trick because then when you take it you're like you know this has to be working i'm an an animal, but you're not, it's not the testosterone. DAA, uh, has a couple of studies, not super long-term conflicting results. So, you know,

if you take it safely, go ahead and try it. Uh, but don't try it without getting tested. You know, you should probably, or not, not tested in the conventional sense.

Uh, for your, before you take any supplement, you should definitely get STD tested. I get, like, your blood labs done. Before you take any supplement. Mike, you should definitely get STD tested. Well, that's a given. Weekly. So, but, yeah, that's actually somewhere higher on the ladder of evidence, but all other testosterone boosters, not so great.

I think that study was luteinizing hormone. Yeah. Was increased. Yeah, so there's issues with testosterone boosters because there's other compounds in the body that you can affect. And then there's also like free versus bound testosterone. And then there's things downstream and upstream. So who knows? You should just be injecting it.

That's the story. Yeah. There's no, we only recommend one thing, which is injecting it directly into the tip. And that's it. No other way to go. If you've ever sat there and gone like, man, I really wish there was one place I could go that just took all the science so I don't have to bother to read it, put it in one place, and then told me if it worked and how much to take and when to take it. That's exactly what your website does, right? Yeah, so, you know, I don't, it's not like I don't have any time, but people like to say this,

you know, with my limited time, I really need a, I need a source to go to. And I do this for everything. Like if I need to buy a device, I go to Wirecutter. I'm not making any affiliate money from this because we don't have any partnerships, but you know, websites that write in depth about issues, you can outsource a lot of your thinking to them. And we're that for supplements and nutrients. Yeah. And you guys don't take money from any companies, no affiliates to those. So the whole idea for you is to go broke and apparently to, to be unbiased is what I'm. Yeah. So, uh, we're a big company in terms of

citations and we're a big company in terms of how many people are coming to our website, but we're not a big company in terms of money. I don't know if that's okay for me to say, um, you know, we're not on a barbell business. I can't wait. I mean, we're, we're making it, but, uh, we're not Dr. Oz, you know, we can't ever say take this because I don't regularly take any supplements. You know, I experiment all the time. Um, so I experiment, I try to be rigorous about it, but I only take what I have to take. So, uh, I, therefore I can't push supplements on the website. Can't either. Cause we don't make any money from pushing supplements. We advocate for reading stuff, you know you know well one of the things that i that i subscribe to currently is you should never take the same thing all the time yeah you should be mixing it up or

coming off of things cycle on and off of things if you really like something but always be in some type of rotation yeah so whenever you talk to the smartest people in the field, they always cycle things. And, uh, like the first interview we ever had for our research digest was, um, uh, creatine researcher. And we asked him how much he takes and how often stuff. And he takes a normal dose, five grams, maybe three grams. Um, and then he says he always cycles off and we're like, oh, you know, is there some new research about um down regulation of stuff and he's like no it's just there's no reason to take it all the time you know maybe there will be research in the future about adverse effects of taking it every day your whole life

probably not but the reason he doesn't take it is because you know you can stop taking creatine for weeks and you still have some creatine saturation, not complete saturation, but you know, you have some and it'll start gradually dropping off, you know, save your money. You don't have to mix something into your drink every day. So, you know, creatine is completely benign, but then there's things like herbs, even multivitamins. We covered a study a couple years ago about a liver health registry. and I read the appendix about what supplements they found had hurt liver health and possibly led to liver failure or death. And I was like, oh, this is totally going to be Beast Max Pro 10,000 or 15,000 or whatever.

That's the best. Until 20,000 comes out, or 22. But you've got to take that one annually. It's the best. Until 20,000 comes out or 22. But you got to take that one annually. It's an enema supplement. We've been talking a lot about enemas before this started recording. Andy started it. Andy loves suppositories.

The bigger the better. First question when we met, he said, where's your suppository page? And I was like, we don't have one yet, Andy. Just hold your horses. And I said, that's why I don't use your website anymore. That's bullshit. That's why it's off my syllabi.

I have to swallow the pills. So, I don't know. It's archaic. Anyway. So, regarding. Completely derailed. Thank you. oh anyway so regarding completely derailed thank you uh regarding some of the the more well-known performance supplements you got creatine beta alanine uh maybe not performance necessarily but like some performance vitamin d um even multivitamins and things like that like something

the stuff that people are probably taking on a daily basis to improve their their health and fitness if they're an athlete that is still competing potentially like what does the research say about those variety of supplements let me start with creatine and kind of just work our way through them so think about it in terms of a venn diagram uh just because you know it doesn't really relate to anything but it's cool so venn diagram with performance science enhancing and body composition supplement. And then the other circle is health-promoting supplement. The performance supplements, the circle's like this big, and the general health is like this big. And then there's a lot of overlap.

That was really, really small and really, really big. If you weren't watching the video. Yeah, if you're listening and not watching. The performance was small. Performance small, health big. So that's how simple it is on the website. You should be a teacher. So reason is, yeah, when I used to teach, students would get so confused.

I don't know if that's bad to say for a podcast. Well, that's why you developed the matrix. I've learned since then. So the reason that is for performance enhancing is you can't trick your body into performing better. You can trick your body into getting better from a condition, but there's only certain ways to lift more at the gym or to lose fat or to gain muscle. And it's because, you know, we have fat for a reason to conserve energy for famine, which never happens. And there's no use in carrying a bunch of muscle.

And in every sport, fighters that are over-muscled lose. We don't need to carry too much muscle. So creatine has the most studies of any supplement, performance-enhancing, and it works. If you're a non-responder, there's no great way to go about it other than make sure you eat it with meals, with protein and carbs. Non-monohydrate forms don't perform better. Creatine is possibly better for other things than for performance, though. So mostly cognition and depression.

So there was a trial last year that was actually pretty well done on either major depression or treatment resistant depression i don't remember what but um creatine the creatine group did much better than placebo and there are some cool reasons why like for example uh the connections in the brain are typically conserved like you don't have a big highway going from one region of your brain to another. But there are some areas that have those big information throughputs. They're called rich club connections. So creatine can make those more prevalent. And if depression is, so depression is not, you know, a lack of SSRIs,

which is why going to the therapist or psychiatrist taking a pill is usually not going to work. And almost every smart doctor knows this, but that's why supplements can be helpful because then you can go about it from non-serotonin angles. And that's where things like creatine can come in. So, you know, for stuff like depression for even for older people and obviously for people who don't eat much meat creatine is not is a no-brainer yeah it's also a fairly direct fuel source for the astrocytes oh yeah as well right yeah the little things in your brain that they need to have they have to go through metabolism as well yeah like they have to produce energy just like your hamstring has to produce energy and atp and all that stuff

well your brains your neurons have to do that. And creatine is apparently a pretty effective fuel for all those. Yeah, and there's not many ways to change energy consumption or fuel use in the brain other than creatine, zero or low-carb diet, taking some MCTs. So creatine is really, that's most a performance enhancement. The other stuff is usually minor that's most a performance enhancement. The other stuff is usually minor, like beta alanine. Maybe you'll respond, maybe you won't.

You know, I used to like it because of the tingling, and that's it. You know, I had no effect. I remember one client, he would take the beta alanine. He would get the tingles, and he'd be working out. He's like, it's working. I can feel the tingles. I'm like, good for you, man. Keep it up. The best part about beta alanine

is it's a fantastic bachelor party supplement. You pop that thing in your glass before you I'm at the club and I'm just, what is going on here? It's crazy. Fantastic practical joke. But yeah, there's just not a ton of stuff. Almost as good as the Viagra you put in my orange juice.

Which is a true story. What? Yeah. Another day. At his bachelor party. He put Viagra in my morning orange juice. The very beginning of the day. Won't get out of bed because he's like,

man, guys, I just can't get out of bed. I'm like a four-hour boner. Viag Fire works. Don't have scientist friends. Yeah, so sports supplementation, not a lot reliably works, but some stuff could work. Yeah, so like one example, I think that this will make it very easy for you to understand at home.

We are saying the reason why we have so much less information on sport performance versus health outside of funding is because of the ability to make change. So something like meditation, which you brought up before the show, has actually a very large magnitude of effect on health markers, but that wouldn't make you

squat more likely. Or it's not what may be a better example is you're not going to put on 10 pounds of muscle meditating. Like there's zero chance of that happening. I knew it was something. There could be a side benefit from doing it, but it's not going to directly impact the muscle. Right.

But it could directly impact your health. It could to a large magnitude, right? Yeah. So there's a balance that has to come into play with, you know, there's these studies that combine four or five supplements and then they find increase in, you know, performance and muscle and whatever. And it's tough because if you take any one ingredient, then the chances are pretty low of benefit unless, you know, you just keep trying until you publish a paper. But then if there's all kinds of supplements, then the question is which one of those, if possibly all of them, is the one that had the effect. And that's why something like meditation or who is it? Dr. Fuhrman did some of the first meditation studies.

And it was meditation, healthy eating, and everything else. And it did awesome. And it's because it's everything. But, you know, people don't care about that. There'll never be a article in the media about, you know, eat mostly whole unprocessed foods, exercise at least a couple of times a week and meditate. And it's amazing. It's because it doesn't sound catchy, you know, and it's not easy either. So an easy supplements rarely ever going to do anything unless it affects hormones in ways that makes it get banned.

That's it. Banned supplements are the best. Yeah. In my experience. Oh, for sure. That's why they're banned. They work very well. Yeah.

Especially on the tip. Let's take a break real quick. When we come back, I want to talk about what would be dumb not to be taking. Have you ever heard of the bone broth? I've heard of the bone broth. The bone broth is one of the first things we got asked by major media. And it's actually super interesting because do you drink bone broth or avoid it? I don't regularly, no.

I have a bunch that I made from my own elk and antelope that I killed. Oh, yeah. Okay. All right. So top that. Yeah, top that. Tell me that doesn't work. So I make it out of nothing.

I buy it sometimes but don't really drink it regularly. But bone broth has no studies. All right. So when you try to research if bone broth is going to help, then you're going to run into a brick wall. And the issue is that certain things get so hype like coconut oil, bone broth, and antioxidants that you lose all perspective of potential benefits. So I used to live in Chinatown in Boston and I would eat tendon regularly because it was at a grocery store, right? And non-muscle meat is quite different than muscle meat, you know, different amino acid profile. There's some things in bone broth, which is used to be

muscle on the bone cooked low and slow, and stuff is released. Um, and the stuff is like those amino acids and then the things that you get in your, you know, joint pill. So, um, the thing is, it's really hard to dose that. So if you're going to take something therapeutically for a specific purpose and you have like two weeks, then take a pill. Don't drink bone broth. But I think bone broth tastes really good, you know, aside from the hype. And, you know, I would otherwise be eating a bunch of junk food. And I think it's, you know, just volume wise, filling your stomach is good. So I think bone broth is actually a somewhat good supplement, you know, not for performance, but. I got a question for for you so if you're eating enough protein do you need to take a collagen based protein powder is there any benefit to that uh yeah there is so

there's a couple reasons why one is um so collagen makes up a lot of the protein in our body especially in joint tissue and in skin and uh the there's two types of collagen that people take. One is a gelatin or hydrolyzed collagen powder. And the other one is undenatured collagen. So the gelatin collagen powder is only somewhat interesting. It does have somewhat decent evidence. It could help joint pain, skin health, you know, stuff like that. But the more interesting one is the undenatured hydrolyzed collagen, which just comes in little pills. So you would have to take about 10, 15, I don't know how many like that but the more interesting one is the undenatured hydrolyzed collagen which uh just comes in little pills so you would have to take about 10 15 i don't know how many grams of the normal powdered stuff um and it doesn't mix well unless you get the hydrolyzed kind but the

undenatured is just 40 milligrams and it doesn't work by taking the pill you know it goes to your knee and your knee feels better. It works through your immune system because through mechanisms that aren't fully understood, your collagen can be attacked. And that's how often joint pain is exacerbated. And if you kind of immunize yourself by taking a little bit of collagen, then you can take that little bit of undenatured collagen and some of the longer peptides will get through your gut into your bloodstream. And that doesn't happen with denatured collagen,

which is gelatin. And gelatin is cooked collagen. So there are reasons to take collagen. The regular gelatin collagen is good because it has a different amino acid profile, like more glycine and stuff. And that could be good for certain things. And then the undenature collagen is good because it has a different amino acid profile, like more glycine and stuff. And that could be good for certain things. And then the undenatured is good because the longer peptides get through and it could help you prevent or decrease joint pain.

Yeah, that's why a lot of people will consider things like arthritis as autoimmune disorders. Yeah. Right. So if you then block that, there you go. That's why your joint pain goes away. You don't necessarily recover or repair the cartilage damage, but you can remove some of the symptoms of the pain if you block that immune response. Yeah. So, you know, number one complaint when somebody goes to the doctor is their back hurts. And usually the response is taken anti-inflammatory,

but, you know, and everybody knows this. If the doctor had more than 15 minutes or if our healthcare system is different than, you know, like my sister is a naturopath, for example, and I'm of two minds because I know she's not listening to this, but she practices interesting stuff that works as well as homeopathy, which, you know, I presume everybody knows is not even a thing. There's literally no thing in the water or the pill, but, um, but a naturopath will sit you down for a while and then at least try to get to what caused the problem. Um, and then if you read like about potential causes of rheumatoid arthritis or osteoarthritis, or even wear and tear from sports, a lot of the mechanisms are surprisingly similar. Um, and the reason there's pain from conditions

like MS and stuff, some of those tie in together. So, you know, you have to think about what caused the issue and then address that, and that's usually a lot more sustainable than taking a lot of fish oil. Interesting. All right, so we've got protein or creatine, and we have whey protein. I think the bone broth and collagen thing kind of derailed us a little bit um what's what's the next supplement you would recommend uh so for performance and fat loss um

i'd say a caffeine stack so uh caffeine or you know we don't advocate but personally when i was into body composition i would take a stack of what is a stack a stack a combination of caffeine ephedrine and aspirin and the aspirin is optional it might not do anything depending on your body weight so those used to be really popular in like 10 years ago yeah 15 years ago ECA stacks were like a big thing when I was like in high school. Yeah, so then what happened is people died. And then Fedder got a really bad rap. Yeah, and somebody at my university died who was on the football team while I was there

and getting interested in nutrition. So that's why it's not something that everybody should take. But a lot of people who are interested in losing fat for contests and stuff do take it, you know, cause you can buy bronchate or whatever at the store. And this is totally not, you know, from examine.com cause we don't advocate anything that might hurt you. But, um, if you're serious about fat loss and that's the legal way to do it, cause you

can't trick your body into losing fat, but, um, caffeine can be thermogenic. Yeah. I, um, I, I take caffeine with L-theanine mostly for cognitive function. Are there performance benefits from doing that? Or am I getting the same performance benefits with caffeine without the jitters and all the negative side effects? So I don't think caffeine and L-theanine together have been studied for performance. I think I might be wrong. And I don't know if L-theanine would blunt performance effects,

but anecdotally I've seen it does nothing but help balance out the edge. Now, just to be clear with what you were saying earlier, in case you were getting really irritated with it, did he just say your secret to fat loss is take caffeine? Sounds like the exact opposite of what your company stands for. And what you're saying is like a very special scenario if you're probably a competitive figure person in the last couple of weeks or something, you're trying to cut that last couple of things. It's not a terrible supplement.

That's not a lifestyle fix for your weight problem. Yeah, no. So you really have to understand what your goals are. And if you're somebody who lifts weights, your goal is not to change your body fat from 14.1 to 14.05 which is what the stack will do um but if you're a figure competitor or bodybuilder then especially if you know you're natural and you're just not that big and you have to get really cut that's where this kind of thing comes into play and there's like you know it can be dangerous that's why i almost didn't say it um and the the football player who died lived in my dorm so it's not you know if you have a pre-existing condition or just the odds are stacked against you you can die and then there's like uh thermogenics that are really thermogenic like d DNP. I was going to ask you about that.

So, you know, that uncouples oxidative phosphorylation, and you actually do lose fat because you're producing heat instead of energy. And, like, back in the day, I was on Lyle McDonald's forum, you know, when I first started getting into lifting weights and ketogenic diet and whatnot. And then I posted a lot, and I was getting more into the science. So, uh, somebody, you know, developed an online friendship with me over the messages. And I was like, Oh, this guy knows a lot about science too. And then it was a ploy. He was just trying to get me to buy DNP for him. Cause he lived in a, in a country where he couldn't get it. And I was like, I'm not buying DNP for you because it's so easy to die.

You know, so extremely easy. If you get a batch that is a different potency, if you accidentally take two pills instead of one, then you die like that, which is why, you know, you just can't. Sounds like it's worth it for me. Yeah, it's only worth it for us. Just to finish this point, then we can move to another one if you want, but what is the efficacy and effectiveness of most weight loss supplements, worth it for us? Just to finish this point, then we can move to another one if you want. But

what is the efficacy and effectiveness of most weight loss supplements, the hydroxy cuts, et cetera, things like that? Usually it's little to nothing. So caffeine or stacked caffeine, realistically, if you take it, and you can't just take caffeine. Caffeine loses any fat burning effect if you take it every day. So this isn't for people who drink coffee every day. But if you cycle your caffeine or stack, you might expect like another pound of weight loss every three weeks or something. I can't quite remember. Hydroxycut or something, no matter how many studies they use, the active ingredients that work are only ever going to be caffeine and possibly like one other one.

And then there's things like raspberry ketones, you know, green coffee extract. Literally anything that Dr. Oz says can burn fat won't. So like calling him out. I think there's my mother-in-law listening to the show. There's maybe one raspberry ketone study. Not the whole show, just this part. Just the sentence. Not the whole show, just this part. Just the sentence. Not the first half.

Like I don't – and it's nothing against these studies either because like there was a study with raspberry ketones and three or four other things and there was some fat loss. But what caused the fat loss? If you take raspberry ketones alone, that's not going to cause fat loss. And then whenever you base things off animal studies, like like 90 of the time that doesn't work in humans so you know all bets are off dumb animals so it's my understanding and i don't remember all the steps involved here but if you take caffeine it makes pre-fatty acids more readily available to be burned but you still have to do the work to burn them yeah like, it's not like you take caffeine and fat burns. Like, lipolysis is a thing that

is caused by something else, which is your activity. So, you know, you have to still be smart about it. You can't just take a supplement. Yeah, it can ramp up the lipolysis, but it won't ramp up any oxidation. So the fat will be removed from the back of your neck or your stomach or wherever. It'll go into your bloodstream.

It will potentially be uptooked by muscle. But if you don't burn it, then it gets re-esterified and restored. So that's why the studies can trick you and say, like, we scientifically proved our product increases lipolysis. It made it available. Right. But if you didn't burn it, then it just gets re- Well, talking about bad research, a study like that,

they could give someone a supplement and then measure the amount of free fatty acids present in the bloodstream and say, well, the amount of free fatty acids present in the bloodstream only occurred because it was taken out of the fat stores. Therefore, this thing burns fat. But that's very misleading. Because it's not going to make you lose. I don't know if that's been done, but that could happen in a study.

Oh, it happens all the time. You're shaking your head like it's done all the time. Go ahead. Yeah. No, that's exactly what most of these blogs and all these other websites will catch on to. That's the references that these bottles will have on them a lot of

the times. Or if you go to their website, those are the references they'll have either whether it's an animal study or it'll be one of these other indirect measures and so they will be able to legally say it burns fat and so that's how they get away with not being sued. But that doesn't necessarily mean they lost fat.

Right, right. Which is the bigger difference, right? Yeah. And the phrasing for a supplement label can be essentially anything they want. You know, it's at the point now where federal regulation, you know, it has been for the past 20 years. But as long as you don't say it cures a disease, you can say almost anything and it's never going to be checked. And now that supplements are primarily sold online, there's too many supplements. So nothing's ever going to be

checked. And, you know, you must see this more than I do, where there's so many things that are claimed to increase muscle mass, but there's also so many things you can measure after a bout of exercise that don't translate into actual muscle mass. Yeah, 100%. That's the major fallacy. Just quickly, there's three things that have to happen to grow muscle. You have to activate signaling proteins that tell your nucleus to replicate DNA. So you have to activate those signaling proteins. You have to express those genes that were the genes that program

for your myosin and actin for your bicep or whatever. And then you actually have to go through the process of actually building. And then all that combines to make a bigger bicep. So really you could measure it at any of those four levels, signaling, gene, protein building, or the actual did I get bigger eight weeks later. And so what they just will do is they'll pick one of those markers but just because you get a 10 increase in gene expression

or a 10 increase in protein synthesis that will not equate to 10 bigger bicep in fact sometimes that means zero like the 12 weeks later their arms are not any bigger or anything like that so yeah that's exactly what they do with the mitogen or muscle growing supplement lines. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So that being said for fat loss and body composition, it doesn't mean there's no way to increase fat loss beyond activity. Um, you know, it's, it might be overhyped at this point, but cold exposure does make you lose fat without doing any extra activity. So it's like an ice bath. Yeah. So ice this point but cold exposure does make you lose fat without doing any extra activity so it's like an ice bath yeah so ice bath or just cold exposure so turning down your thermostat um walking outside with less clothing on you know as long as you're safe so you go out you jog you

jog and it's 50 degrees outside you go jogging shorts and a t-shirt you'll you'll potentially lose more fat in that yeah and it's so it's all about exposure time yeah so uh that's why something like um like a cold shower won't do anything an ice bath well because you're in it for a while um there's potentially some lingering effect like have you had cryotherapy and yeah i haven't done it yet i know it is so that can slightly boost fat loss and it's not because of the time you're in it it's because the time you're out of it afterwards um so if you do it for a month you'll burn a bit more fat and then because you're at work presumably the whole day especially if you work at home uh wearing shorts and a t-shirt in 64 degree weather versus

70 is actually quite a bit of calories over the course of the year so that is a way to hack your fat loss that is safe and doesn't involve any money i watched kelly start do a talk and he talked about burning a hundred thousand extra calories a year by standing at your desk so that was the second thing i was going to bring up so um it's like the equivalent of running like you know 20 marathons or something yeah so like the bare minimum you should do when you're working is take micro breaks you know every 20 30 minutes but um as long as your trunk is engaged you know when you're not sitting you're burning some calories once you're sitting you know nothing's

going on from here down that's what we're saying right now. We're trying to get shredded. Exactly. Yes. So those are the two ways. Those two combined will do more than anything, any supplement. Are there any supplements that jumped to the front of your head that you think are really effective or you're really excited about that people aren't talking about? Yeah. So, um, let's see, there's one that everybody's talking about, but possibly not the right way. So, um, probiotics, you know, everybody and their mom, usually the mom is taking probiotics and, uh, and it's a lot more complex than people think. So we have a complex, um, environment of microflora in our gut and you can get it tested. You can go to

company and test what kind of species of bacteria in your gut, but they've been there for a while doing their thing. When you take a capsule of probiotics, it's not going to go down there and like be king, you know? So there's a couple options. It might do nothing because probiotics don't permanently colonize your gut lining. Once you stop taking them, that's it. Usually that is. And then there's a lot of stuff that people didn't know when they started researching probiotics. So they're like, well, you know, probiotics don't colonize the gut,

so why was there still some impact after the person stopped? Or these probiotics were damaged, but they still had some impact. Dead probiotics can also have an effect because the components of the cell wall can affect what goes on in the gut. And, you know, tell me if this is too far left field, but when you take probiotics, it's usually like you have gut health issues or nowadays there are studies on probiotics and performance or probiotics and depression. Depression is because there is a direct connection between the gut and the brain.

Performance is because the brain is involved in performance. Plus, the muscle, you know, needs a nervous system to perform. And most people's guts don't have a wide enough variety of bacteria in them. And we don't have any parasites in our gut, which is good. Some of us don't. I got that shit handled. Okay. My bad. My bad.

Didn't want to trigger you. So we want to make our guts more diverse. So one way is eating more plants, but the way is probiotics and it's you can't just take probiotics and then things are better uh we had talked before the show about prebiotics and probiotics so um companies have started adding like inulin to their probiotic pills or to their foods it's a terrible idea because i don't know what percentage of people but a fairly big chunk of people get diarrhea or gas after inulin. And, you know, why put that in everything?

It's like how orange juice makers, my orange juice probably has calcium in it now. You know, calcium supplementation, just like haphazard, is not a good thing. You know, atherosclerotic plaques and arteries, there's calcium in there. So you don't want calcium just like willy-nilly and soft tissues. So similarly, I think probably a better strategy than getting a fancy probiotic is eating normal food, starting with a probiotic and microdosing it. So you don't want to just introduce a probiotic because who knows what's going to happen. Start with a little bit, see when there's any effect, and then titrate up over time because when i used to experiment a bit more with wacky supplements um you know i would start low go high and i would double blind myself because i was

crazy um and you know then i knew if a supplement was doing anything i'm not saying you know go to extremes like that but do things in a rational manner. Don't just take a bunch of stuff and see if anything works. Yeah. I started taking probiotics last June. I saw a benefit. Yeah. There was obvious benefits. I felt better, and I started going to the bathroom better too.

Yeah. That's number one or number two. Going to the bathroom. Your point about the calcium is also very true for things like magnesium, for iron, right? These things have major toxicities when they're not appropriately dosed, right? So you don't want to just take these things like, oh, well, I guess vitamin C is good. I better take that. I guess vitamin E is good. Better take that.

We need to have a better approach to that because some of them can be extremely toxic so like uh iron for example um you know anybody that's cool cooks in a cast iron pan yeah can we agree here anyway i don't but uh cast iron pans are made out of iron and leach iron you know um especially if they're not seasoned correctly and when you get iron from that if you happen to take a multivitamin with iron and then like a fortified cereal or something and then you eat a lot of meat all of a sudden you're getting too much iron if you don't let blood ever

then a decent proportion of white guys genetically Notice how he pointed to you, not me Not me Am I the most white guy in the room? What about Mike? Definitely the whitest guy. Who'd you point at? I don't want to say anything.

Okay, go ahead. So, you know, a decent portion of people who have ancestry from Europe can easily build up iron in the blood, and iron can very easily be a pro-oxidant. So, iron and vitamin C together, you know, possibly not that great of an idea no matter what people recommend.

So there's problems with iron that never get, you know, talked about in the news. So when the red meat and cancer scare came out a couple years ago, a report from the World Health Organization, you know, red meat is totally fine even though they classify it as a carcinogen. But heme iron interacts with gut lining differently than non-heme iron, which is why no matter how much iron you eat from plants, it's not going to have a negative effect. But heme iron from animals could, depending on how much iron you get and how healthy your gut lining is. So that just shows all this stuff works together. If you don't take probiotics and you eat junk food and your gut lining sucks, then you might have a worse problem by eating a lot of red meat. But in the context of a healthy diet, red meat, you know, we've eaten it forever and it's totally fine. So you can't just isolate one issue. Yeah. So for, for prebiotics or rather,

excuse me, for probiotics, I heard that if you take a bunch of antibiotics and then you essentially destroy your microbiome in a way to kickstart it again, so to speak. Some people say you should take probiotics, but one of the arguments I've heard against that is that, well, you have an immense diversity of healthy bacteria in your gut, and then you take a probiotic and it's five strains, and you don't really do that much good since you might have had many dozens or hundreds or i have no idea how many different strains of bacteria in your gut but if you only introduce five you're not really attacking the

problem at a high level yeah so uh this kind of gets at what i talked about before um people microdose probiotics sometimes if they have a very sensitive gut. But other examples are if you had a colonoscopy, if you had heavy dose antibiotics, then you don't know what happened to your gut because the colonoscopy irrigates and washes out bacteria, like 80%, 90% up to that level. A broad spectrum antibiotic can wipe out a lot of bacteria, but it only wipes out certain bacteria. And it makes other bacteria stronger because they take up the space, other bacteria were in there. So then if you take a probiotic, like, you know, with 10 or 20 billion units, and then you have a low species

diversity of probiotics that are not helping, you can get into huge trouble. And that's where I have a friend who works for the CDC in the department that looks at C. diff and other hospital-based infections. And it's mostly an issue with older people because your gut health goes down, you have infections, you're in the hospital. But it's happened with younger people where something happened, you took antibiotics, possibly you took probioticsics and then you have some crazy you know food poisoning or something and then two years later you have a colostomy bag and you can't poop so you know even if there's a 0.1 chance of that happening that's high enough

for me to think when you take supplements the number one thing you want to avoid is the worst case scenario you don't want to die you know know, you don't want to have some crazy disease. That's why taking a small amount of a probiotic of one that has a lot of different species or a fermented food would probably be better. Uh, you know, ideally you'd have your own fecal microbiota and pills and you could take that. So you're replenishing your old supply, but i think most people don't have those most people aren't there yet that's a great topic to dig into though yeah i mean i currently change probiotics every three months and i and it's got a ton of very i'm

not buying the cheap stuff that just at the grocery store okay and then obviously a lot of fermented food um and then i have friends i've done fecal transplants yeah you know they they found somebody who was very healthy taking their poop put it up their shooter and yeah so fecal transplant is possibly the most interesting topic that's you know been around the past year or two and uh so i was talking to this guy at the cdc about it and he was like yeah it's like too many people are doing them and And I was like, what, you know, why has there been harms? And we're coming from different angles because he's trying to make sure that nothing weird happens that he can't predict to, you know, cover the CDC's ass. And from my perspective, there's two ways to get or three ways to get a transplant. You either have C. diff, in which case you're allowed to go to doctor and get a transplant. You can go to a clinic that does screening, but it's not regulated.

You know, so a naturopath or something often outside the U.S. now, like there's one in the Bahamas, I think. Or you can do it yourself. And the do it yourself, you know, it ends up being the same. But oftentimes people aren't screening. And there were like very slightly alarming case studies. Like somebody had a fecal transplant and they gained a ton of weight and they don't know why. And it's linked to the transplant. I mean, that's not great, but they didn't die. I mean, I'm not saying just go

out and do one, but people are often facing the issue of like, I cannot solve my condition at all. I don't know what to do. Pills aren't helping. I don't want to take, you know, prednisone the rest of my life. Yeah. You know, fecal transplant, whatever, or other things like, you know, low dose naltrexone. Have you heard of that? So, um, autoimmune conditions can be tough to treat. And, uh, one thing that some people online look at is a drug called naltrexone, which is used, um, to, uh, to treat opioid overdose, um, and also addiction to some things. And because it works on opioid receptors, um, and opioid receptors are involved in other things, low dose naltrexone, if you take it at night in a very small dose, starts working at night when you're in bed and blocks the opioid receptor in your brain. And then the next day your body can respond by boosting its endorphin production a little bit. there's some other mechanisms but there's been some small trials of like ms symptom reduction

multiple sclerosis symptom reduction and a lot of gut diseases are autoimmune in nature so you know the doctor's never going to talk about this kind of stuff with you and we don't actually discuss low-dose naltrexone on our website but it really pays to understand research a little bit because then you can understand fecal transplants if you absolutely need to. And to note, you want to get a fecal transplant. You want to get that sample from somebody who's healthy. That's the idea. You're not just taking any random shit. You're not just at the 7-Eleven like, yeah.

Okay. So we went through somewhat of a top five for performance. And then we've talked about health here and there. But we haven't really made like a top five health supplements list um if we if we were to do that what would be on that list so one is something that uh overlaps with performance i should have mentioned which is nitrates um so creatine works a lot for performance and by a lot i mean reliably um and the second one that is fairly reliable is nitrates. And nitrates are found in certain foods, beets, red beets, and kale and some other leafy greens. And there's just been

more and more evidence every year that it helps with different types of performance. So most often sprint, but possibly some shorter endurance activities and possibly some lifting activities and definitely for CrossFit type stuff when you're off and on the go. And there's no like nitrate supplement in and of itself because the government regulates sodium nitrate as a dietary additive for red meat or for processed meat. But you can eat beets. You can make a kale smoothie or you can get beet powder or something. And that's almost definitely going to help. And it's by increased blood flow and some other stuff. So the precursor to nitrate is arginine for the

most part, right? So what about arginine supplements? Are those shown to be effective or not? Arginine a little bit, citrulline a little bit, neither as good as nitrates. So if you really want the nitrate, it's either you can't get it or you got to eat it from the food. Yeah. And the thing about eating it from the food is, so when you eat food versus supplements, there's a slower breakdown and absorption of compounds in the food. And that just makes it all the better for nitrates because you want the nitrates to be in your bloodstream a bit longer and a bit more extended because part of the benefit of nitrates is performance but the much more important part is heart health you know like we didn't know by we i'm saying i represent every researcher ever

we didn't know why plants were good for heart health and then researchers were like it's the fiber it's got to be the fiber because animals don't have fiber and plants do. And they're like, oh, it's probably not the fiber. Oh, it's probably the antioxidants. No, it's probably not the antioxidants. So possibly a big part of it is nitrates. There's not that many foods that boost nitrates. People who eat those foods tend to have better heart health. There's never going to be a 20-year randomized trial of eating kale. But in absence of that, I'm saying, you know, kale is overhyped, but kale and beets and arugula and a couple other things that are high in nitrates are always worth putting at least maybe one into your diet, assuming you can stomach it. I'm going to blow your mind. I drink fermented beet juice most mornings. I can't talk anymore. It's too much.

Didn't you experiment with acute use of high-dose beet juice before a workout? Didn't that not go well? It didn't go well for me. It was way too high. What happened? And I also added in raw eggs. So it was raw eggs and beet juice, and I mixed it all up. And hill sprints. And then, uh yeah hill sprints in 105 degree weather

and so when I was throwing up amongst a crowd of 100 people that were all doing it with me it looked like I was puking up blood because it had like that consistency from the egg the raw eggs with the red beet juice so it really looked like it was so you didn't you didn't tape this you're saying before you don't tape the best moments? I was pretty miserable. That's like 100%. 100% moments don't make it to Instagram. Yeah.

Yeah. I didn't see that happen. I wish I was there to actually see it. I was busy doing the workout. People were worried. People were worried. I was like, I just woke up late and drank way too much beet juice, and I'm just throwing up.

That's the thing. And people are like, holy shit, call 911. That dude's dying. Yeah. Yeah, I know. Beet poop as well. That can be worrisome. Totally.

Beet juice, beets. Yeah. Yeah. You got to watch out. You're like, oh, my God, what happened to me? Yeah, I'm dying. Okay. So nitrates, uh wellness and performance uh number two uh let's see

a really good multi-mineral not a multivitamin because you know that's a dime a dozen doesn't matter quality who cares but um you know we're rarely shortened vitamins at least people who pay attention to what they eat. A lot of people take supplements that have some vitamins in them. But the issue with minerals is that vitamins are tiny and minerals are big as far as quantity that you need in your body. So, you know, the amount of vitamin D you need in your bloodstream is extremely tiny. But the amount of magnesium you need is so big that a multivitamin producer will never put enough in a pill because then it'll be too big to swallow. So it's a logistic problem.

And that's why there's like, you know, packs with 20 pills that suck to take and you just stop taking them. But rather than taking all those pills, just focus on what you're not getting enough of. So, you know, if you are interested at all in nutrition, track at least two days worth of what you eat on average days, one weekend day and one weekday. See what you're low in. There's only a couple services that look at micronutrients. So use one of those and eat more foods that have those things you're missing. So for most Americans, it's minerals. Magnesium, iodine, you know, like people avoid salt and then they don't get enough iodine. Plus iodine in higher amounts is sometimes therapeutic. So there's not a ton of studies on this, but doctors hundreds of years ago used to just give you iodine.

You know, like they would let your blood, they would give you iodine. The bloodletting doesn't work, but the iodine sometimes does work. And more and more people have thyroid issues now and possibly that can help sometimes harm. And then magnesium, you know, it's extremely hyped for a reason because it's involved in almost everything.

If you have things that involve too much excitation and often that's like not falling asleep, then magnesium is something to consider. So a multi-mineral is good and it has to be a quality one because the most common form of magnesium is magnesium oxide, which is absorbed at a very low rate, like 10% or less. In fact, that's why milk of magnesia helps you poop. So take anything except for magnesium oxide. Citrate, threonine, whatever. They all work fairly well.

And then if you don't want to take a magnesium supplement, eat foods with magnesium. Or if you have a lot of money, drink mineral water. And some mineral waters have magnesium in them too. I think you just made a really good subtle point that all these things in nature, they don't have one effect. So magnesium doesn't help you fall asleep. Magnesium just does what magnesium does. We can then use it if we're depleted or low in that to help us get to sleep better because of excitation. But at the same time, you said

it can help you go to the bathroom or if you have enough of it and you add with that supplement, it will give you a bunch of diarrhea, which is the same effect, right? So if you're taking magnesium, if you try that and you're like, oh my gosh, I got diarrhea all the time. Well, that's the thing it does. That's how I wake up in the morning is I drink magnesium before bed and when I wake up with the shits. It's like better than an alarm clock every day of the week.

No snooze button on that. Yeah. So that applies to everything, you know, not just magnesium, I think. And the next year, we're going to try to centralize some of our side effect information. So it's easy to see, you know, on a range of however many milligrams, however many, where there might be benefit and harm. And that's down to like the most benign supplement, like vitamin C, you know, it's super overhyped and underhyped strangely at the same time. So, you know, it's overhyped and underhyped, strangely, at the same time.

So, you know, it's overhyped because people will take it at the first sign of a cold. They'll take it because they want energy. You know, you don't produce energy by taking vitamin C. On the other hand, have you ever seen House, the show? Dr. House. I know what it is, but I don't want you saying it. He's got a cane. That's all I know. He has a cane. He's a jerk. And he's really smart.

So in this one episode, he gets shot by a patient, and then he has to go into surgery, and he has some strange dream, and he has really bad pain because he had a blood clot in his leg many years ago, and that's why he walks with a cane. So when he goes under, he has this dream, and then when he wakes up, he tells his boss slash lover, put me in a ketamine coma, and then he goes under he has this dream and then when he wakes up he tells his boss slash lover put me in a ketamine coma and then he goes back under and then when he comes out he enters a k-hole comes out no limp no pain uh so the reason is actually related to um vitamin c so vitamin c is a primary water-soluble antioxidant.

It does some stuff that other antioxidants can't do. And this very bad pain condition, reflex sympathetic dystrophy, is one of the worst pain conditions. There's a scale called the McGill Pain Index that's used in studies that goes up to like 50. Childbirth is like 24 or something as it's breaking a bone. And this condition can be up at like 41 so it's extremely painful um when you have it sometimes if you go outside so what you're saying is childbirth isn't that bad i'm saying like i would do it right now if i had the option

to but luckily compared to this other thing so is this is chronically like that like all day every day yeah you're out of 41 it's chronically like that it's all day, every day? Yeah. You're out of 41? It's chronically like that. It's terrible, you know. And the only way to get out of it is a ketamine coma. And ketamine coma is not allowed in the U.S., so you have to go to Mexico or Germany. And House on the show, like, told his dream self, told his awake self to do it. And seven years later, after I started reading about this stuff, I was like, didn't I see an episode of house about this? So I looked it up. And then what I found is a, uh, there's ketamine, uh, intranasal sprays that could possibly help and ketamine drips and

stuff. But more interesting that nutrition related is that they didn't know if you could prevent this condition, RSD, uh, before they started looking at vitamin C. So the way RSD develops is often you'll have surgery or break your ankle or just have some injury lifting weights. And then you're like, it's not getting better. Now it's getting worse. Now it's swelling up. Now like extra hair is growing or, you know, just crazy shit. And the people who took vitamin C every day in supplemental form didn't get this condition. So then they did their first randomized trial and they're like, you know, comparing normal dose to higher dose to no dose. It actually only takes extremely normal dose, 500 milligrams of vitamin

C every day for 30 days after you get injured to prevent this condition. So vitamin C has all these cool uses because it's this special antioxidant that don't get talked about. All it ever is is like, oh, got to take my emergency, feeling a cold coming on. But vitamin C is actually not very good for that. You know, you have to take it kind of for an extended period before you get a cold usually. Yeah. But there's cool uses potentially aside from that. Right on.

What's next? So Omni is... What's the ketamine is that again that's what i'm confused about what are the benefits of that so uh anybody taking ketamine um i do not take ketamine okay so i have i have um but it was for therapeutic purposes so there's a there's a um receptor in the brain the NMDA receptor, N-D-M-A receptor, that is involved in a lot of stuff and can also possibly be a target in the future for depression-oriented medications. But ketamine is on the list of World Health Organization required drugs or whatever because it used to be used as a – oh, can we stop for a second? Yeah. I just got a foot cramp.

Surprise, we're back. All right. We were talking about – I was asking about ketamine. Yeah, so ketamine. It is an NMDA receptor antagonist, meaning it blocks this receptor. There's also other things like D-serine, an amino acid that affect the receptor that could be used for depression. But anyway, ketamine is often used recreationally, but its most promising role is it could help depression, you know, like in the course of one dose. There's people who have treatment-resistant depression or anxiety or something that just doesn't respond to anything,

and NMDA can be critical in this. So I took it for pain. So I have this crazy condition, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, where my joints are often tearing. And after a while, I was like, you know, I don't want to keep taking opioids for years and years. Cause then you get some, um, sensitization and then bad stuff happens. So I got a ketamine drip, uh, from this doctor, this anesthesiologist, and it was interesting. can sort of reboot your nervous system um within the course of one high dose session and uh i think i had 750 or more milligrams of ketamine oh that's that's a lot um it was and it was and the thing is i was uh i was going under as the doctor asked me about the dose and so i didn't know what's going

on he was like 750 okay or that was it and i was like i don't know what's going on and you know i'm like going under and he's like oh uh you know if we go high then we're gonna have to give you and i didn't hear and i just went under yep so then uh then i woke up and my girlfriend drove me home and i couldn't move at all you know so i was just like being pulled along and i think i'm possibly was drooling and then i had to pee and we had to stop at a library and i peed just out the car what i understand about ketamine that's a very high dose so yeah it's a pretty high like a party dose would be people do like between 100 and 200 yeah so um and this was in a drip so it all happened like soon and and i guess it was such a drip, so it all happened, like, soon.

And I guess it was such a high dose that the guy said, instead of giving, like, anti-anxiety meds so you don't have a psychotic break, they gave me Haldol from, you know, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Oh, yeah. So, eventually, I didn't know what the hell was going on, but I didn't have any pain. Boy, you were super sensitive so and all kinds of crazy shit was happening so i was watching an nba game and it was like legos and this wasn't a psychedelic thing it's hard to describe it's almost like what it does is um it dissociates parts of your brain which is why it can help break like a pain cycle or a depression cycle or whatever. And then you take booster doses like every week or two in very small amounts to help that pathway. So when you dissociate stuff, your conscious mind is like, you know, not experiencing things it's ever experienced before.

And I was not experiencing pain, but I was experiencing really weird stuff. Um, and I've only taken very occasionally other psychedelics things, and this was nuts. So I would never take a high dose recreationally, but, um, if you have some crazy pain or depression or something issue, um, and you know, a forward thinking doctor, then, you know, check it out. You can get a drip or an intranasal or something issue um and you know a forward-thinking doctor then you know check it out you can get a drip or an intranasal or something you just have to look really hard i was watching a tedx talk on on ketamine and they were the comparison there was that as far as as far as someone's mental health like for physical health we we have things like

vaccines where where you take a vaccine and then then that helps you prevent having a disease in the future. You take a vaccine and then you get exposed to a disease. And because you have the vaccine, you're less likely to be afflicted by that disease because you took the treatment before the exposure. Yeah. Make sense? And they're basically making the same comparison. We don't have that for for um mental illness so to speak for for anything that's you know anxiety depression etc based we don't have anything that you take

beforehand and it prevents you or makes you more resistant to to contracting a disease or or developing um some symptoms or whatever in the future and they were saying that ketamine is actually one of those things where it makes it where it's more likely that you're much more resistant to even something as low levels like social anxiety in the future. A stress inoculator. Yeah. I hesitate to even say it like this, but there's – have you guys ever read this book Island by Aldous Huxley? It's on my bookshelf. I have not read that one.

I haven't read it yet. They introduce drug use when you're a kid, partially so you don't abuse drugs later, but partially for that reason. And there's all kinds of stuff like, you know, take ice baths every day and do whatever else so then you are better at handling stress. But ketamine can actually work like that. And the cool thing is we don't know all of exactly why.

And ketamine at like one dose or at small sustained doses is not harmful. Like the one thing is possibly urinary problems if you abuse it. So, you know, it's just too bad that research doesn't go in that direction because there's so much research on ssris and they come after the fact and they do nothing before the fact but um ketamine can give you some perspective just like mushrooms can you know and if you have that perspective i don't know if that's physiologically tied to what it does to the receptors but i would guess that could inoculate. There is some evidence that psilocybin does that.

It actually impacts the neural connections. Okay. Yeah. Do you know how, in what ways, ketamine and MDMA are similar in their effects? I don't really know. I don't want to, because I'll probably misspeak if I hypothesize. I would imagine part of the reason is that there just isn't that much research done on MDMA. It's just now going through, I want to say it's phase three trials.

It's moving into the last phase of trials to make it where it's available again as a prescription drug for MDMA treatment-resistant psychotherapy. Yeah. treatment resistant psychotherapy yeah so all of um whether it's lsd or ketamine or whatever um what's unfortunate is that all the research gets done in the u.s and and all the the places where it's used commonly other than like silicon valley it's mexico and stuff you know so there's places in mexico where they'll try all kinds of much more effective things for various conditions. I'm not saying like some stupid cancer thing, you know, that's going to kill you. But mental issues don't respond to pharmacotherapy, you know, and you know much more about this than I do. And doctors who get into that stuff often move to other countries so that they can test it out in their non-controlled clinical trials.

And there are case reports, but I think it's mostly phase three now. Yeah, I'm trying to set up an interview with somebody who was one of the first LSD researchers. And yeah, he lives in a, where does he live? Yeah, somewhere in Eastern Europe. Okay. Yeah, somewhere. I can't do it here. Yeah, unfortunately. Yeah, what else were we missing on?

CBD? What's some obvious health? Well, CBD is something that's kind of coming on the scene right now. It's just now gotten, they've figured out a legal way to ship it to all 50 states. And so now that's becoming a much more common thing. I have a few friends that are involved in CBD companies. What are the benefits of that or if there are any? So CBD, high CBD strains, CBD in isolation and CBD and THC can all have different effects.

And possibly the coolest effect of CBD alone is, and I think I've only seen one study on this, but topical preparations for pain. So, and actually it's possibly best used in combination with other things. A lot of people, even doctors don't know that there is peripheral opioid receptors and that means that you know the huge opioid epidemic could possibly be mitigated by rubbing opioids on places that hurt but there's just been so few studies interesting and there could be some synergy with adding some cbd to the opioid mixture um and then you know going back make out of the kratom yeah so and i i live in the Bay Area, so every street corner basically is one of these things. Right. Somebody taking or selling.

But interestingly, there was a medication, an anti-inflammatory, Voltaren, that's commonly used for joint pain. And then this other one came out called Penc i think where um where the anti-inflammatory was in a base of dmso um and nice so dmso is penetrates is this old school um compound that's used for pain and some other stuff and um it crosses the skin so easily that uh if you have like you know cologne or perfume on your skin, it could come out your breath. That was another thing that was really popular in high school. You sprain your ankle on the football team, you put DMSO on it. I feel like I haven't heard much about it in the last 10 years.

You definitely mix testosterone with that. Oh, yeah. The taste. I don't know if that's true. So I used to go to this in Chicago. When you were young, that's what they did? Not when I was young. Never mind.

We won't talk about that. Okay. So there haven't been DMSO studies in years, like many, many years. It's still used in labs for other stuff, but not therapeutically. But there was a guy at this powerlifting gym I went to in Chicago who, it's like he got hurt all the time, and all of a sudden, every every day he was better and we couldn't figure out why. And then he told me one time when I bought DMSO and it works. Now when I say it works, I don't mean like you take it no pain because people think about pain like it's a symptom.

But pain is like the opposite of contentment. So as many things as cause happiness cause pain. So if DMSO works for a specific type of mechanism for pain it won't work for all the others but dmso does help possibly because the sulfur and dmso or possibly because of something else but um when they put this anti-inflammatory and dmso doctors started using it more and not just because they you you know, it was the newest drug on the market, but I think the base works, you know. And if you compound a cream at a compounding pharmacy that has CBD and some other stuff and like gabapentin and other things that, you know, relax nerves, I think that's one way to get around opioids. But that's just my opinion.

Is there a lot of, from what I understand, there's just not a lot of research on CBD yet just because of, due to the prohibition. Yeah. And, you know, like we said before,

there's not going to be a lot of research probably in the next four years. So it's going to be a lot of trial and error on people's own parts. Yeah. What about cannabis overall? So you mentioned THC. So CBD is a compound.

One of, I think there's about 40 something useful useful, or we suspect to be useful compounds. Yeah. So we have, the CBD is one of the popular ones, and THC is the psychoactive compound in the cannabis plant. And there's been shown, like from what I understand, a 3 to 1 ratio of THC to CBD has been shown to be pretty effective for recovery. Have you heard anything like that? Yeah. So so we have a page on effects of marijuana in general and compounds. And it's a tough one because I don't. Did we talk about meta analysis before?

No, no. So the issue with most studies done on CBD, THC or just pot in general is like we had we had covered a study on marijuana and creativity. And and what they did is, you know, they randomized people to different amounts of pot or nothing. And then they did brain scans and other stuff. And there was no increase in creativity now you have to take it with a lot of grains of salt because how do you measure creativity you know there is a standard test for a certain type of creativity but there's different types of creativity to test and you can't do all of them um and that's an issue with almost all trials and then there's all kinds of other issues like the effect on somebody who smokes regularly versus hasn't smoked at all or the effect on old people versus young people is often completely different. I've never smoked at all.

You're just fucking terrified. Yeah. How are you going to be creative in that state? Yeah. And it's just it's hard to study and which makes it even harder because it's hard to get research money for that now. Yeah. Right. to get research money for that now. Yeah, right. So, you know, and in the Bay Area, everybody smokes, you know, and everybody reports back to their like quantified self friends about what happens.

And I've seen all kinds of different things. So I used to work with a physician to develop a quantified self program for his patients who are addicts. And then later his patients who had metabolic disorders. And then later for people who just wanted to perform better. And it's just so different. Like this one person was previously a smoker, thought it was okay to smoke again because he was trying to lower his anxiety.

And then he just dropped out of the program because like, I don't know, we don't even know what happened. But once he started smoking, I don't know if like he was the like prototype on the commercials of you lose motivation or like he started taking other stuff or i don't know what somebody else like they had so much anxiety that they couldn't interact at family gatherings and then just a low dose of vaped marijuana and it's gone And they're like functional So

I think The research isn't good enough yet To trump experiences Yeah If you I think if you want something like Safe and easy for anxiety Uh

Kana I think is I think that's legal It's a little root You can drink Make tea out of Oh okay K-A-N-A

No not kava It's about kana But what about kava and kana together? Synergy. Possibly. Kava tastes like shit, though. I'm sure they've got kava bars up in San Francisco. Yeah.

Yeah. Have you ever tasted it? Yep. It's gross. Yeah, but... It's like dirt, right? I think I inoculated myself early on by taking unflavored BCAAs. Oh, yeah.

Everything tastes good after that. Everything tastes good. I make this joke in class all the time when I ask people. Actually, I want to get your take on BCAAs in general. That's a good one. Maybe even HMB too. But I make this joke about BCAAs nonetheless. Like when I ask people, like how many do you, if you take BCAAs,

like a certain amount of hands go up. And if I say, how many of you, or what's your favorite flavor? If you have an answer to that, you're not taking BCAs for the right reason. It's like, oh, I take the watermelon one. Like, oh, okay, to do anything? It's just an excuse to drink a flavored drink, because most of the BCA drinks are so flavorful now. Yeah, BCAs taste like emergency.

You know, there's no differentiation. But, you know, the general, I think, possibly people know now that BCAAs usually aren't worth it. You know, all muscle meat proteins contain BCAAs. Dairy contains BCAAs. Possibly some people who are fasted might benefit from BCAAs. And then possibly in synergy or to antagonize certain amino acids crossing into the brain. But that's not what people take BCAAs for. They take it for muscle gain and it's not.

You can't hack your BCAAs or your muscle growth. If you're watching your calories and you really want to only buy leucine, okay. But there's very few instances where you have to cut out those other protein calories. Yeah. Yeah, it's usually my list of most overrated supplements. That's not to say they don't work at all. You just lay out a bunch of instances when they would be helpful, but it's generally very overrated.

Yeah, and it's just, you know, price is an issue and BCAs aren't super cheap. Yeah. I'd like to hear more about the matrices that you told us before we actually started recording where you have a visual display of something like BCAAs or vitamin D or what have you where you show on your site in a very easy to follow visual way how strong the evidence is for a list of different benefits for a supplement. So we have a matrix on each of our big supplement pages where it has an outcome, like let's say BCAAs and muscle growth,

or muscle protein synthesis or whatever other intermediate outcome there is, and then a list of the studies that have been done and the strength of evidence and the direction of the effect. So oftentimes it's mixed evidence. That doesn't get shown by supplement companies, but there will be mixed human randomized trial evidence, but solid rat evidence. And we, 99% of the time, focus on human trial evidence because we only want to tell you about animal evidence if it's for like a side effect for something because side effects are

not systematically collected by the FDA. So oftentimes you can only get mechanistic stuff from rats or case studies. But, you know, in our matrix, we'll have the full list of effects and that's where it's good to look at something that you might think you know everything about like creatine because new research will get, you know, pushed to the top of our list because that's where most of the studies are. And there's not a ton of new research being done

on innovative uses of creatine for muscle, but there is for brain stuff. So that's where you'll want to look at this matrix and possibly even read the studies. So it kind of works like this, and please correct me, but if we're going horizontally, it'll have the different effects horizontally, right? So growth or cognition or strength or speed or whatever right and then as you scroll down it'll give you green or yellow

or red or whatever the color scheme is it tells you like green or i can't remember what it was it means that there's a very large effect or something that is minimal or there's an arrow right so you get a you can look up what you're trying to get the outcome for and then you can figure out okay is it just like or is, whoa, this is really something to do. And then you have resources also for what form to take it in, what amount, what time. And all that stuff is right there all together. And it has all the 100 or 200 studies on BCAs in this case are all in that spot, right? But it's all matrices out.

Yeah, so like another example is some people take lavender for sleep. Um, lavender is used in like, uh, you know, holistic, whatever, whatever aromatherapy, but lavender actually does have an effect on the brain. So, um, lavender could help with intrusive thoughts that keep you from falling asleep. Um, and it could be a weaker alternative to medications so uh like in a main in the matrix we'll have outcomes for anxiety for sleep latency and for other stuff and then how much evidence which is for lavender not going to be much and then where the evidence leads you so a bit of effect or a large effect or whatever but for something like lavender it's pretty important whether lavender was studied with other stuff because you want to know, was it the proprietary blend of lavender? Was it

lavender aromatherapy? Or was it lavender as a pill? Because those all work differently. And then we have that for everything. So for fish oil, like fish oil is not a monolithic thing. There's different amounts of EPA and DHA. At some point, or if we haven't already, we'll incorporate krill oil and some other alternatives to fish oil. And then even fish oil differs depending on whether it's in pill form or the liquid form, you know, because oxidation of the fatty acids can be different. So form matters a lot, and when you take stuff matters a lot, and that all usually gets lost.

So it's good to look at the matrix. Boom. Dope. Do you have, like, an Instagram account where we can look at, like, booty shots and stuff like that? I have one just for booty shots. Yeah. I think I have Instagram probably, but I don't use it.

Facebook, I'm on Facebook. That's where I post stuff, at Miranda July. That's a long story why I'm not Kamal Patel, but it's Miranda July. All right. And obviously people should go to examine.com. Yeah, go to examine. We answer every email, even if it takes a few days. And we like hearing about people who are curious.

So email us. I think you're on Twitter, right? I'm on Twitter, too. Examine.com is our company. And then I'm at Zen Kamal, Z-E-N-K-A-M-A-L. Dope. Thanks for joining us today. That was insightful.

It's my pleasure. That was very fun. Thanks, dude. See you. See you.